The Science of Birds - From the Field: Birding Nepal and Bhutan

Episode Date: January 11, 2025

The final installment of "From the Field" episodes from Ivan's 2.5-month journey through Asia. In this episode he describes his experiences in the Himalayan countries of Nepal and Bhutan. ~~ Leave me a review using Podchaser ~~Link to this episode on the Science of Birds website Support the show

Hello from Kathmandu, Nepal. This is the Science of Birds. I am your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. This episode, which is number 109, is all about my recent travels through the countries of Nepal and Bhutan. For the last two and a half months or so, I've been traveling through Asia, and these are the final countries that I visited.

Now, if you're new to the Science of Birds podcast, you should know that the last few episodes have been unusual because they have been, quote-unquote, from the field episodes. I have recorded each of them in some hotel room, in some Asian country and then edited them while on the road. And so they're, first of all, they're unscripted. I'm just working off of an outline.

Normally, my podcast episodes are scripted. And I'm not working in a controlled environment. I'm just in a hotel room with whatever ambient noise happens to get through, whether that's dogs, cats, people, birds, car horns, screaming children, whatever. So this episode is what I'm considering, Phase three of this big Asian Odyssey trip. Phase one was when I was leading a birding tour through Vietnam and Cambodia. Phase two was scouting two different provinces in China for a future birding tour.

Then that was what I talked about in the last podcast episode. That trip, that portion of the trip, that phase was about three weeks. And then this episode will be about Nepal and Bhutan, which was also about three weeks. Okay, so that's what this episode is going to be about. I hope you enjoy it, and you can come along with me and vicariously enjoy the countries of Nepal and Bhutan. Okay, to set the stage a little bit, both of these countries are in the Himalayas, the massive, vast Himalayan mountain range. Nepal is in the west and Bhutan is a little bit further east.

They're separated by the Indian state of Sakim. And in general, you can think of these as being north of India and south of China, sandwiched in between those two massive countries in the basically, yeah, and basically the Himalayas. Now, where I traveled, I was in the sort of what I would think of as the foothills of the Himalayas, even though we got up to some pretty high elevations. The Himalayas are, as you know, very high, and we did not get way, way, way up into the alpine country. I wasn't at Everest base camp or anything.

So most of the places I visited were actually forested or there were grasslands. There was vegetation because we just weren't up at super, super high elevations. Now, in terms of latitude, all of this, this entire episode occurred roughly at the same latitude at about 27 degrees north and for reference the tropic of cancer to the south

is about 23.5 degrees or is at that latitude. So we weren't quite in the tropics but at lower elevations we were definitely getting into sub-tropical type ecosystems. In the last couple episodes I talked about biogeographic realms

I'm not going to go into that ad nauseum here but just to point out that where I was again was the animals and plants I experienced were a mixture of species representing lineages from both the Palearctic biogeographic realm in the north, as well as the Indo-Malayan biogeographic realm from the south. And you know, as I was doing this trip here, I realized, I kind of finally thought about it, and I realized that until I visited Vietnam in 2024, early 2024, and in this trip, I had never been in the Indo-Malayan biogeographic realm, and that was the last

biogeographic realm on the planet that I haven't been to. Well, of course, there's still one, I guess. There's Antarctica. My arch nemesis, the continent at the bottom of the world that I may someday get to, and I talk a lot of trash about Antarctica, but actually I really, really want to go down there. Someday. But anyway, the Indo-Malayan biogeographic realm, yeah, it was new for me. And so when I first visited, there were massive numbers of new species of birds and everything else. All right. So that's the biogeographic realms. We have, you know, it's kind of the transition between Palearctic in the north and Indo-Malayan and the south. We have the latitude. And in terms of the ecosystems, these are going to vary or did vary a lot across elevation.

going up 1,000 or 2,000 feet or 500 meters or whatever, that would often result in a dramatic change in the vegetation and therefore in the birds and other animals that we would experience. So I just said we. In Nepal, I was more or less on my own for about a week, but I did work with some local guides. And then when I was traveling in Bhutan, I was traveling with my good friend David,

who is a fellow birding guide, and he works with me, leads some tours also for my company Wild Latitudes. He's actually about to start a tour here in Nepal, and that's where I am, Catmandu. And then in a couple years, he and I will co-lead the Bhutan tour. So I was in Nepal kind of just because I had some time to kill between China and Bhutan. So I only had a week in Nepal, and then I was in Bhutan scouting for that future tour, and that lasted about two weeks. So this region, the Himalayan foothills, let's call it,

is really special for bird diversity. I think I mentioned in a recent episode how if you look at the distribution of bird species richness around the world, there are several places that are major hotspots, Southeast Asia being one of them, and the Himalayan foothills, this kind of arc along the lower elevations of the Himalayan, that too is a, you know, kind of red line on the map representing lots and lots of bird species. And, you know, honestly, it's becoming one of my favorite places to go birding on the planet

because you can just, again, move up and down these elevations and find whole different groups of birds, different forest types, and it's just really exciting. You find that similar phenomenon in the Andes Mountains in South America, in the neotropics. In Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, you know, you just move, up and down an elevation on these steep slopes and you get these totally different mixtures of birds. It's really neat. So in the episodes talking about Vietnam, Cambodia, China, I was pointing out different special groups of birds. And I'm still in more or less the same part of the world. So the same thing applies here. We have groups of birds, families

that are special to this part of Asia. And that continued. That trend continued in Nepal and Bhutan. So we have things like laughing thrushes, parrot bills, babblers, leaf warblers, old world flycatchers, pheasants. All of those groups are well represented or uniquely represented here in this part of the world. So yeah, there's lots of amazing bird diversity to see here, much of which you can't see anywhere else. So if you're looking for a new place to go burning, you could do a lot worse than southern or southeast Asia. All right. Well, why don't we go ahead and do sort of a little travel log, starting with Nepal and then we'll talk about Bhutan, and I'll just kind of walk you through my experiences. Nepal is a sort of long, skinny country running west to east, again, in the

Himalayas, and it's roughly the size of the U.S. states of Iowa or New York State that might help you have a mental image. Nepal is, of course, super famous for being a place to go explore the Himalayan mountains to go trekking. And most of us have probably heard of Kathmandu. It's this big sprawling city. I really enjoyed having some time walking around exploring it. It's, you know, big, big, messy, loud city, but really culturally fascinating. There are lots of temples and things.

I think I might have maybe mentioned that last time. But yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed my time exploring here in Kathmandu. And one of the things is, one of the major sites to see is the grand or large stupa, which is a Buddhist temple. It's this kind of dome-shaped structure with this tall, pointy, tower-like piece on top. It's beautifully painted, and there's lots of prayer flags around it, and it's surrounded by this square, which I guess is really a circle, and different shops and things, and there's a neighborhood there, but basically what people do is they walk in a clockwise direction around the base of the stupa, and there are these prayer wheels, and it's a form

of Buddhist devotional practice. And it's really neat to see all these people of, you know, different walks of life. And there are Buddhist monks and things all walking around the stupa in a clockwise direction altogether. And of course, day one, I was there checking this out and I couldn't help but notice that there were a few birds around. Flying over the stupa, there were black kites. It's a type of raptor.

They were catching the thermals up over the stupa. There are lots of house crows and hundreds of rock pigeons, feral peels. pigeons. But in general, the city itself is not so great for birding. There are some parks and things within the city. I did not explore those. But I did go with an excellent local guide, the guy that we're working with on our Nepal tour. And he took me up to Polchalki Hill, which is outside of the city limits. It's this tall hill that rises above the city several thousand feet. And we went up there early in the morning with a Jeep when we hired a Jeep and did a day of birding and it was really great. And one of the highlights for me was early in the morning

we had a small flock of calige pheasants crossed the road right in front of us. The Calij pheasant, Lofura Lucco Melanos, is a bird that I had wanted to see for a long time. I mean, any beautiful pheasant is just awesome. You know, you come across it and they're amazing. And this bird is kind of a dark, gray, black color, the male anyway. And he has a lot of red on the face and head red skin with this really great black crest, a fancy sort of rooster tail that's compressed from left to right side to side. And there are several subspecies of the calige pheasant and I actually saw a couple over the course of this journey, but they're all beautiful in their own way. So that was really exciting. And then we went on to explore

Polchalki Hill to see different kinds of laughing thrushes and parrotbills and full vettas and Sibias and so on and so forth. So right off the bat in Nepal, I'm starting to get new lifers, new species that I've never seen, even though fairly recently I was just birding in the eastern part of the Himalayas in China. So there is a lot of overlap in terms of the ecosystems and the species between parts of sort of south central China and Nepal and Bhutan. That said, the latter countries still have lots of unique species that are not found further east. So a couple days later, I got a ride down the mountain to the low elevation part of Nepal, to Chitwan National Park.

Now, this is a sort of premier national park in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. It's enormous and it protects a vast amount of biodiversity. So I had a local guide and I did a kind of walking safari in the park for an entire day. And it was spectacular. We had to cross the river to get in there, so you take like a little canoe across the river, and then you get on shore, and in the morning it was kind of foggy and almost cold, so I was layered up, and by the afternoon I was actually in a t-shirt, and it was actually pretty warm, almost hot.

But right off the bat, as we get on to the sandy shore of the river, we start seeing tracks. We see rhino tracks, elephant tracks, and pretty soon, going down the trail, we see tiger tracks, Bengal tiger. and tiger poop and elephant poop and all this stuff, and we're hearing elephants in the distance. And, of course, we're starting to see all kinds of birds. So this is relatively flat terrain.

I ended up walking about eight miles that day with a local guide, and I ended up seeing 87 bird species, which is a massive number of birds for one day for me. And I got to think about almost 30 lifers that day. So the birds were really exciting. There were parakeets and shrikes and... and bee eaters, some owls, other raptors, all kinds of good stuff. But dig this.

One of the crazy things, one of the sort of amazing experiences of this entire Asian odyssey was seeing Indian one-horned rhinos. I wanted to see one of those beasts my entire life, and I ended up seeing five that day and actually being fairly close to a couple of them, hearing them grunting and pushing their way through the tall grass and crossing the road. and one was bathing in the water. I watched another one wade across the river. It was spectacular.

I mean, who doesn't love rhinos, right? And these things, it's just like a living tank. It's amazing. Another highlight for me was seeing an interesting species of crocodile or a crocodile, the garrial, G-H-A-R-I-A-L. This is a specialized fish-eating crocodileian. It's very much endangered, and I saw about five of them. them in the river, and some are basking on the shore. They have this long, skinny snout. You may

have seen pictures of these things before with kind of a bulbous tip to the snout. And they're specialized for fish eating, so they have lots of real narrow, pointy teeth for catching fish. And that was super cool to see those guys. And another bird highlight was actually seeing wild Indian pea fowl, right? So what we would generally call peacocks. There were several females, so pea hens, and yes, there was a male peacock, and that was spectacular to see in the wild. Because I grew up in a place in Southern California where peacocks were kind of a common thing. People had them in their yards as pets and stuff. So I grew up hearing the calls of peacocks somewhat regularly and seeing them.

So even though the Indian pea fowl is one of the most spectacularly beautiful birds in the world, when you've seen it a lot, you kind of get used to it, right? and you take it for granted. So I really had to tell myself, hey, that is a wild Indian pea fowl, and that is amazing to see. Imagine if you'd never seen one of those before. So that was super cool.

So as I said, I only had six or so days in Nepal, and that was divided between a couple days of birding and a couple days of just exploring Kathmandu, checking out the temples and the souvenir shops and drinking lots of tea and coffee and getting a massage or two, and just soaking up the vibe. It's just really, really neat here.

But it was then time to go to Bhutan. So I got on a plane. I met up with my friend David and we flew to Bhutan. So we were lucky to have seats on the left side of the plane as we were flying to Bhutan. And Bhutan is to the east of Nepal. So that means we were looking north at the high Himalayas. And the weather was clear. It was a sunny day.

So we could see that. massive peaks rising far above the foothills. And here's another epic thing that happened. Another sort of what feels like once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I got to see Mount Everest outside the plain window. Just really clearly right there, and that thing is 29,035 feet high or 8,850 meters. And there it was.

I was looking right at it. That was just really cool. So, Bhutan. Have you heard of Bhutan? Some people have. Some people haven't. It's a smaller country. It's only about a quarter of the size of Nepal, similar to, it's similar in size to Switzerland, maybe a little bit larger than the U.S. state of Maryland. Bhutan is actually the most mountainous country in the world. Almost the entire country is very rugged with lots of steep topography, lots of mountains. So even though it's a small country, I think if you flattened it out and then you remember, the area, you squished all those mountains till it all was two-dimensional, that the country of

Bhutan would be something more like the size of Canada, because it's ridiculous. It's very, very wrinkled and folded up. Now, if there's one thing you might have heard of about Bhutan, and if I didn't spell it, it's B-H-U-T-A-N, and that is the concept of gross national happiness. The previous king of Bhutan, and there is a king in Bhutan, the previous king in the 1970s, came up with this idea of measuring gross national happiness rather than something like gross national product, as many other countries do. So rather than it being purely about economic output, Bhutan prioritizes the well-being of its people and its natural environment. So there's actually these four pillars of gross national happiness. One is sustainable and equitable socio-economic development.

Two is preservation and promotion of culture. Three is environmental. conservation, and four is good governance. And as far as the environmental conservation part, that might be the most interesting to birders and other nature lovers. Bhutan is actually more than just carbon neutral as a country. I think it's actually sort of, it actually is storing more carbon than it uses up because of its forest cover. And part of gross national happiness is that as a national policy, Bhutan is directed to preserve at least 60, percent of the forest cover in the country. So Bhutan is carbon negative, at least, if not even better. And there are basically no other countries with that status. So compared to Nepal and a lot of

the neighboring countries, Bhutan has preserved a lot more of its natural environments. And so that is one of the big attractions of visiting Bhutan is you get to experience these natural environments, all the birds, all the plants, all the good stuff. Now, as far as visiting Bhutan, it's not something you can just do on your own. They actually regulate tourism pretty tightly. The country was closed for many decades until not that long ago. But even now, you don't enter Bhutan unless you have the backing and the support of a local guide. You don't just show up.

You have to arrange basically a tour. So we were traveling with a local guide who was excellent, and it was really a special experience. again, this was scouting for a future Bhutan tour that we're going to be running in a couple years. So I had pretty high expectations for Bhutan. I heard lots of good things from friends of mine, other people who've traveled there. And I got to say that it exceeded my expectations. It's a really amazing place to visit from both the naturalist perspective, the birding perspective, as well as the cultural perspective, just as general travel. Because as part of the gross national happiness sort of policies, Bhutan has preserved a lot of its more traditional

culture, from the architecture to the way the people dress, language, customs, religion, all of that. So as you're traveling through the country, there's this kind of somewhat uniformity of the building styles, the house styles, for example. And even though there are some modern versions, they are more or less the way they have been for hundreds of years. And there's lots of farms and very few modern trappings that are conspicuous as you're traveling through the country. There are just these kind of two-lane curvy highways that travel through the country and there aren't that many roads. And you go from village to village, town to town. And there are no billboards, no flashing lights, hardly any street lights or anything. It just feels very pastoral. I don't know

if quaint is the right word. I mean, you know, they certainly have mobile phones. and TVs and satellite dishes. There's lots of modern conveniences in Bhutan. But along those lines, I should point out that Bhutan did not get television until 1999 or the internet. They didn't allow it. So yeah, it's it's unique in many ways. And I had a fabulous time. So let's talk about what happened. So over the course of two weeks, we drove through many parts of the country and saw a vast range of the ecosystems from the subalpine forests that were primarily conifers and lots of rhododendrons and bamboo down into a couple different types of broadleaf forest. So at the higher elevations, that would be a cool broadleaf forest

and then a little lower that'd be the warm broadleaf forest and then even lower would be sub-tropical forest. And again, you get different bird species in each of these. And at the highest points, we got up to maybe something like 11 or almost 12,000 feet in elevation. And at the lowest, when we got to southern Bhutan, we were basically just outside of India. We were only at, you know, maybe 600 feet elevation. So a few hundred meters or a couple hundred meters. Personally, I enjoyed all of the different ecosystems. I think if I had to pick one that was my favorite, it was probably the cool broadleaf forest.

It was just very pleasant. I loved the vegetation, you know, these massive, gnarly trees of various species. Some of them were oaks, but most of them were covered in all kinds of epiphytes. So lots of orchids and lichens and ferns and, you know, this multiple-layered canopy with the big, big trees and then the sub-canopy and bamboo and shrubs and all this stuff, and just a really rich avian diversity. So I think I mentioned before that one of my favorite groups in this entire Asian Odyssey experience has been the laughing thrushes. I've seen them in all of these countries, and I saw a lot more new species in Nepal and Bhutan. And again, these birds have amazingly diverse plumage patterns. Some of them are very colorful. Many others have just rich patterns of brown, gray, black, white. but they're just very active they travel around in groups they're often very vocal but they're also often hard to see as they move around in the undergrowth so i did get some recordings of some of their

sounds so let me go ahead and play that and you know they are called laughing thrushes because some of them sound kind of like they're laughing like a group of birds that are all laughing at you so here is um this is the these are some striated laughing thrushes they make all kinds of different calls but i think this would be something more akin to their actual song So this again is the striated laughing thrush. And then here's another recording of striated laughing thrushes. And there's in the foreground you hear a greater yellow nape, which is actually a type of woodpecker.

So that's the kind of single note loud sound, and then you've got the laughing thrushes as well. And then another recording of a different laughing thrush species. This is the white crested laughing thrush. And these guys are really cool looking. Their heads are pretty much all white and they've got this big white mohawk. Thus the name, white crested laughing thrush. So here's the recording of those guys. So let me just point out some of the birds that I was really excited to experience in Bhutan.

First of all, I saw several species that were representatives of new bird families for me. There are only roughly 250 families in the world, and I got some new families under my belt on this trip. First off, I think it was actually day one, we saw. a honey guide, a yellow rumped honey guide. Honeyguides are in the family Indigatoridae, and there are only 16 species in the world, and they're all basically African or Asian. And this thing, this yellow rumped honey guide, kind of looks like a finch, even though it's not. Again, it's in a different family. It has kind of a small head proportionally, and it has yellow on the head and on the rump. And this kind of a cute looking bird. And these guys, they eat wax. They eat bees' wax. They eat bees

wax. That is one of the superpowers of honey guides. And that's really unusual in the animal world, the ability to digest wax. So the yellow rumped honey guide hangs around the hives of, most often of species of bee called the Himalayan giant honeybee. And the hives are these kind of spade-shaped things that hang out in the open. They're not hidden inside of a tree or something. They hang under like a rocky ledge, an overhang on a cliff, or sometimes on a temple, a building. And each of these hives is maybe two or three feet across in diameter. It's kind of a half circle shape. And the honey guides just hang out in the trees or bushes or on the cliffs nearby,

and they go and they eat the wax, and maybe sometimes they eat a bee or two or some bee larvae. And they're territorial, so they chase off any other honey guides that come around. and it was just really cool to see my very first honey guide, so I got to see a representative of the family Indicatority. And then there were a couple other species representing new families, and these species, the two that I'm going to tell you about right now, belong to monotypic families. And what that means is it's a family that has only one species in it.

So the first is the wall creeper. This is the only species in the family ticodromedi. The wall creeper looks kind of like a nut hatch, and it actually used to be considered a member of the family citadie, which is the Nuthatch family. It's gray and black with a long, down-curved bill, and really spectacularly, it has wings that when they're spread, you see this black, white, and red pattern in the wing,

and it's really gorgeous. And they kind of flick their wings as they're moving around on cliffs, foraging for small insects and things along the cliff face or in crevices, because they really do creep around on the walls, thus the name wall creeper. And I've tried to see this species in Spain and I was looking forward in China with no luck until I got to Bhutan and I got to see a couple. And I was so excited.

And perhaps the most amazing bird experience or observation that I had on this entire trip through Asia was my friend David spotted a wall creeper on one of these Buddhist temples on a stupa, also called a Chorten here in Bhutan. this beautiful white temple, this dome-shaped thing with a point on top, surrounded by beautiful forest in a national park with all the prayer flags flapping in the wind. And there was this little wall creeper cruising around on the white painted wall. And we all grabbed our cameras and we went nuts trying to get pictures of it. And yeah, I got some pretty cool photos and I was just so jazzed to see that bird in that context crawling around in the walls of a Buddhist temple in Bhutan. And the

National Park, the forest around was, or is one of the places it has a dense population of tigers and leopards and all kinds of stuff. So, you know, just what a crazy thing to experience. What a great way to see the wall creeper. So that was a new family, Tychodromadee, the wall creeper. And then another bird that represented a new family for me was the ibis bill. Another species that we looked for in China did not find. And we found it in Bhutan. And this is a really cool bird. It's the only member of the family ibidorinkedy. So it looks kind of like a shorebird, maybe like a plover-shaped body,

but it indeed has a long-down-curved bill like an ibis. But it is not an ibis. It's its own thing. And the habitat of these birds is rivers. They forage around among the cobbles, the rounded boulders, along decent-sized rivers. And the bird has kind of a gray body with some black lines and white markings.

And the bill is reddish orange. But the bird can be hard to see as it's walking around among these large cobble rocks because the body just kind of blends in. It's kind of camouflaged. So one of the best ways to find them is to listen for the call and then sort of zero in on the bird that way.

So yeah, I was just super jazzed to see the ibis bill. Very, very cool. We saw several of them across our journey, across our journey. You know, I do that. It's one of those words. Do you have something like that? I say across, across, but of course there's no tea at the end. So I have to catch myself. And I did just catch myself and I told you all about it. So there you go. Don't say across. Okay, so continuing on with bird highlights in Bhutan, we had black necked cranes. So if you listened to my episode on cranes on the family Gruidi, you'll remember that there are 15 species in the family.

and this was a new one for me, the black-necked crane. This species spends the winter in certain valleys in Bhutan. And in particular, Popjika Valley is famous for the wintering cranes. This is kind of a typical crane with a grayish white body, a big fluffy black tail or upper-tail coverts, and yes, a black neck with some red on the crown. And we got to see dozens of these things at fairly close around. range and, you know, they're just majestic and beautiful. You see them in flight or walking around.

I mean, who doesn't love a crane, right? And you see some representations of these cranes in the paintings on the walls of the Buddhist temples, and that's really cool. So, yeah, that's one of the key species that many birders want to see when they visit Bhutan is the black-necked crane. One of the birds that I was most excited to see, and I actually saw another subspecies in China, was the blood pheasant. So I saw them in China and in Bhutan, two different subspecies that look quite different. But this bird, Ithaginus cruentis, the males are, I mean, just amazingly colored. So overall, you've got kind of a gray body. The tail is mostly white, the neck is mostly white, but the face is kind of a blood.

red or kind of a crimson. And then there's some crimson on the breast and lots in the tail. And then there's this lime green wash on the belly and on the wings. And most of the feathers have a bright white line running down the center. So there's kind of this streaked or pinstriped look to the overall bird. And it's kind of chicken sized and chicken shaped. But yeah, I mean, what a cool thing, right? First of all, cool name, right? Blood pheasant. And we saw this great flock that was crossing the road and we got out and we were taking pictures and they just kept coming and they would stop and look around and the females are really charming as well they're just kind of this grayish brown all over with an orange face and it was just so great to watch them and we

were way up in the mountains it was a coniferous forest very cold both times I saw these species it was at very high elevations. So we're talking, you know, 10,000 feet or higher. And in Bhutan, when we had this flock, so we're enjoying them, taking photos. And then suddenly we hear this kind of whooshing sound. And we didn't know what it was. It was very, very quick.

It was just like, whoo. And we saw out of the corner of our eyes, this dark bird swooping down into the forest. And it landed and we looked at it and we realized it was a mountain hawk eagle. And I'm pretty sure it was. swooping in to try to catch one of these blood pheasants. So that was a wild thing to witness.

We didn't see it actually get one of the pheasants. I guess, thankfully, for the pheasants. Lucky for them. But yeah, a little predation in action, at least an attempt. So the blood pheasant is in the family Phasianity. And another representative that we mostly heard in Bhutan, even though I did see this species in China, was the rufous-throated partridge,

Arborophylla Rufo Galeris. So we heard them quite a few times in Bhutan, and the call that this bird makes is great. To me, it sounds like the Rufus thwarted partridge is going to explode. Like it's going to, you know, it has this rising call that once it gets to the end of it, it's just going to blow up in a explosion of feathers.

So we were kind of cracking up about that. Another of the sort of top five or top six birds that one wants to see, a birder would want to see visiting Bhutan, is Ward's Trogon. W-A-R-D-Pos-V-S, Ward's Trogon. We did see a couple. We saw a male and a female after trying many times in different places. These species are kind of in mid-elevation, broadly forest with large, old gnarly trees covered in epiphytes. And I've seen, I don't know, a good dozen or more trogone species around the world. And this one, man, this one might be the most beautiful, in my opinion.

The overall impression of the male is that it's purple and blue and red. He's got kind of a red belly, purplish back and breast, a reddish orange crown and bill tip. But like bluish black elsewhere and pale blue skin around the eye. just a stunningly gorgeous bird. And when we first saw it, it was just like right on the side of the road, right out in the open. So, of course, we're scrambling with our cameras. And then it just flotters off a few meters back into the brush with, you know, terrible photo opportunities. I mean, we got to enjoy it and we saw the female and it was all great, really, really wonderful to see that species.

Because a bird like that, it's possible to spend a couple weeks in Bhutan and never see. So, yeah, we considered ourselves lucky. And we did eventually see the red-headed trogone as well later on. That's not quite as rare, but that, you know, any trogon is exciting to see. So as I mentioned, we saw lots of different laughing thrush species. And one species in that family that I was most excited to see was the Himalayan Kuchia, or Kuchia, Kuchia Nipalensis. So it's in the laughing thrush family, but it's not called a laughing thrush. And we tried for this bird a number of times until we finally saw it, and it was great.

We saw a group of them foraging high up in the canopy, but we got decent looks. And what this bird looks like, the male is, well, both males and females are kind of stout or chunky-bodied birds. They're not as thrush-shaped or elongated as most laughing thrushes. So they have kind of a short tail, chunky body. And the male has, he's got a black mask, this kind of bluish-gray crown, a white throat, and there's these really conspicuously barred sides. So it's kind of black and white barring. And then a bright Rufus-colored back.

The female has similar coloration, just a little lighter, more of a brown face rather than black. And so it's just a really handsome bird. And they're in groups and they're kind of huddling together and moving around and pecking around among the leaves and ferns and orchids on the tree branches. A couple members of the family parody were also, highlights in Bhutan. You may remember from the episode on China that I saw the sultan tit there, which is the largest member of the family parody. So that bird has a really conspicuous yellow

crest. It's kind of a basically a black and yellow bird all over, really, really unlike so many other tits. So I got even better looks at that species in Bhutan. And I also saw the yellow brow tit, which I didn't talk about before. I think I also saw them in China, but this is nowhere near as exciting looking, but Silva Paris Modestis actually has the word modest in there because it's not very colorful. This is actually one of the most primitive or ancient lineages within the family parody. So to me, that's kind of exciting to see. You know I love phylogeny. I love evolutionary history of birds. So I like to see some of these more primitive representatives. And speaking of primitive representatives of a family, I got to see for the first time a Eurasian Rye neck.

W-R-Y-N-E-C-K, Rineck. That is the most primitive member, or one of the two most primitive members of the family, Piccadie, the Woodpecker family. It does not look at all like your typical woodpecker, nor does it behave like your typical woodpecker. So this thing has kind of got a scaly, brown plumage overall, and yeah, it was just really exciting to see.

So I did talk about Rinecks a little bit in the Woodpecker episode that I did. So it's always just exciting. you know, I do these podcast episodes about one bird family or another, and I talk about all these birds, but in some cases I have not seen the birds that I'm talking about. So it's really exciting when I finally get to get out into the field and have these personal experiences. Also in the woodpecker family, we had piculets. I saw the speckled piculet in China, but I also saw it in Bhutan. And then we had the white-browed piculet in Bhutan, which is a bamboo specialist.

So you have to go into the dense bamboo habitat in order to find that bird. And we did, and we got great looks at it, even got some decent photos. And this thing, this is a tiny, tiny member of the woodpecker family. It has what looks like basically no tail. It's like a little nugget of a bird. And it's clinging to the bamboo and it's chirping away or calling away. It's just a great little funny bird. Another cool bird to see was the southern nutcracker.

I saw them also in China. Again, there's a lot of overlap. I did see them in China, but I saw them much better in Bhutan. So the Southern Nutcracker is a member of the family Corvody, the Crow and Jay family. And it's a relative of Clark's Nutcracker, which is the North American species, which is also in the genus Nusufragga. So the southern nutcracker is Nusufraga hemispila or hemispyla, and Clark's Nutcracker is Nusifraga Columbiana. The Southern Nutcracker is kind of brown overall with black wings and black tail, but it has really bright white outer tail feathers, also like Clark's Nutcracker. And the Southern Nutcracker has a black crown, a gray bill, but on the face and the

scapular feathers and the breast, it has all these white streaks and spots. And so that really, to me, gives it really this really beautiful, interesting plumage. and so like other nutcrackers these birds are loud and interesting and intelligent they forage in the high coniferous forests they eat the seeds of coniferous trees and yeah we we saw them mostly at a distance for much of the trip and that's what happened in china but eventually we came across this flock that was kind of going nuts on the cones of blue pine and they were all around us on both sides of the road and it was just amazing and we got really good looks. All right, and one more bird to highlight in Bhutan, and that is the white-bellied heron,

Ardea insignis. This was one of the last new bird species that we saw in Bhutan, one of the last lifers that I got. This is also one of the primary bird targets that many birders would want to see in Bhutan. It's a critically endangered species. There may be only 50 to 250 individuals left. And it's a shy, easily disturbed species, which is perhaps one of the reasons that it's so endangered. It requires fairly pristine mountain rivers and streams with lots of rocks on the banks. It's a very large heron described as imperious, mostly gray with, yes, a white belly. And it has these kind of crest plumes that hang off the back of the head like other members, like some other members of the genus Ardeo. like the Great Blue Heron.

And yeah, we finally saw one. Our local guide, I've got to give him credit. He's the one that found it, even though we were all looking, almost on our last day of the trip. We found it. It was way down there in the river, kind of far away, but we saw it. We got the scope on it. It was really exciting to see.

But, of course, when you're seeing a critically endangered species, it's also bittersweet, right? I'm taking some photos and little video clips, and I'm thinking, it could be that in my little, lifetime, this bird goes extinct and that I have photos and videos of it of a bird that no longer exists on this planet. And that is really a hard thing to think about. So there is a breeding facility in Bhutan where they're trying to captively rear some of these birds. But habitat loss, habitat destruction or disturbance, that's the main problem. So even if they're raising birds and releasing

them, those birds may not survive if the habitat is not protected. Because even though Bhutan is progressive in its environmental policies and conservation. People are still people, right? So there's still problems. Nothing is perfect. There's still habitat destruction and loss. But in any case, the white-bellied heron, really great to see and a really special thing. So we traveled through lots of different environments through Bhutan, again, from the sort of high

coniferous forests and grasslands, all the way down to the small patch of flat land between right at the southern end of Bhutan just north of India. And then on our last full day in Bhutan, we did something that is basically required if you go to Bhutan. You got to see this thing. And that is the Tiger's Nest Monastery. It's just outside of the city of Paro, which is where the main airport for the country is.

And it's way up in the mountains on this precipitous cliff, and it takes a hike to get there. But it is a must-see thing. It's like if you go to France, you've got to see the Eiffel Tower. If you go to Peru, you got to see Machu Picchu. Well, if you go to Bhutan, you got to see the tiger's nest. So we got up early in the morning.

We drove to the trailhead and we got hiking. And it was pretty cold in the morning. There was frost and frozen water around. So we were all layered up. And we had to hike about 1.8 miles or a mile and a half or so to get to the monastery. But you're starting already at pretty high elevation. you're starting at something like 7,000 feet. And the monastery itself is at 10,200 feet or so.

So about 3,000 meters or 3,100 meters, something like that. So over the course of this hike, you have a lot of elevation gain. It kind of just goes up, up, up. Some of it is just kind of a sloping, rocky, or dirt trail. Other times you're on stone steps. But yeah, I will admit I was huffing and puffing a lot. because again, you're just at high elevation, if nothing else. But, oh boy, was it so, so worth it?

You get those first views of the monastery across this ravine, this gorge, and you're looking at it. It's got pine trees and these steep, I guess, granite cliffs. I'm not sure if it's granite or limestone or what. But yeah, you know, you've seen the pictures probably, and you're looking at it yourself, and you're just like, wow, there it is. And it actually, like the whole country of Bhutan, it exceeded my expectations. Now, I won't lie to you, there were a lot of other people. It's a popular place, so the trail was packed with tourists to some extent.

Okay, not packed, but there were a lot of people, but you got to just get over that. And so then you go to this thing, and I honestly didn't know ahead of time that we were actually going to get to go inside of the monastery. That was a very pleasant surprise. And like many other Buddhist monasteries in Bhutan and elsewhere, you're not allowed to take photos inside. You actually had to take all of your electronics and put them in a locker. and you get to go inside. And in some cases, you take your shoes off to go inside of an actual temple or shrine. But yeah, this thing, the architecture is amazing.

It really is perched right on the edge of this cliff. You just keep trying to imagine how people built this. It was originally made in the 1600s, even though the site was famous among Buddhist practitioners for hundreds of years before that as a place to meditate. And I guess it burned in the late 90s and they had to kind of rebuild it, But you'd never know that, and it is remarkable. And the intricacy of the paintings and the statues once you go into the shrines, it's incredible.

It really is awe-inspiring. And, you know, I'm pretty sure just about every other tourist on that hiking trail and at the monastery couldn't care less about the birds, but, man, we were sure tuned into the birds, and there were some good ones. Right in the brush just below the monastery itself, on a pretty precipitous part of the cliff, We had birds like white-browed, fulveta, black-faced laughing thrush, white-throated laughing-thrush, blue-fronted red start, alpine accentor. Actually, a couple of those little guys were crawling around right on the monastery itself. There was a bearded vulture that flew overhead, a lammergeyer, that was super cool. And then I actually did get one final lifer in Bhutan, and that was right there at Tiger's Nest, and that was the Rufus-breasted bush-robin.

So, yeah, even then there were some birds right there. So that day was spectacular. As I was hiking down from the monastery, I just felt kind of ecstatic and just very peaceful and happy and fulfilled. So yeah, I've traveled many places around the world and Bhutan is high on my list of amazing places to visit for both the birds and natural environments as well as the culture. The people were friendly, charming, and just everywhere we went was fascinating. I highly, highly recommend a visit to Bhutan. Okay, so how about a few general thoughts about my experiences in Nepal and Bhutan? Or actually, and also this is just kind of a summary of this entire, what I'm calling

Asian Odyssey. Over the entire trip, this is five countries again, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Nepal, and Bhutan, I had 443 new species, lifers. And that is pretty exciting for me. You know, I'm not super fixated on my life list. Yes, I make lists, but I'm not like a fanatic. I don't think. But, you know, it's exciting. It's fun. Why not? Right? So to break down the number of species that I saw in each country, this is not lifers. This is just the number of species period that I saw in each country. In Vietnam, we had 140. That was over 12, 13 days. Cambodia was one week and we had 77 species. China was three weeks, and that was 361 species. Nepal was just really a couple days of birding, but six days overall, 136 species. And then Bhutan, two weeks, 311 species.

So all along the way, I was entering data into eBird. So I was making bird. So I was making bird. checklists at every site. So all across these countries, I submitted 407 eBird lists. And that's how I know how many species I had in each country. And it's a great record of where I went and what I saw. And of course, when you use eBird, you are contributing data to citizen science. Ornithologists and other scientists can use that data for good, hopefully, rather than EVille. So yeah, lots of eBird checklists. And the single biggest list I had was in Chitwan National Park. The morning there on one particular walk, which was about two miles. And over the course of three hours, I had 62 species. So that low forest, that kind of flat, open forest where the rhinos were and whatnot,

that is a very diverse habitat, lots of bird species there. The second most diverse spot was also in a flat sort of lowland area in Bhutan. That was just outside or just outside the limits of the city of Gellifu or Gellipu. And that was at the sewage treatment ponds. If you've been birding for a while, you know that sewage treatment ponds, these are often really great birding hotspots. So, you know, it may not look the best or smell the best, but birds seem to love these places. So we had over the course of two hours and of less than a mile walk, we had 55 species. at the sewage ponds in Galapu. And I should point out that, you know, across this journey,

because there are some ecological consistencies, especially between South Central China and the Himalayas of Nepal and Bhutan, there were a handful of species that I saw in all of those places. So, for example, the red-headed trogan. I saw multiple places in China and saw it in Bhutan, as well as Vietnam. Likewise with the velvet-fronted nut hatch. I saw it in Vietnam, China, and Bhutan.

Same thing with the green-backed tit and large-billed crow, and so on and so forth. So there is some consistency in the Ava Fana in some cases. And like I pointed out in the last episode when I was talking about China, at least in the winter when birds aren't breeding in this part of the world, most of them aren't. The biggest bang for your buck is when you come across a mixed species flock. At other times in the year, in the spring and summer, the birds kind of go their separate ways, right? The birds pair off and breed and they're nesting, so you don't really come across mixed species flocks.

Did I say across? I might have said across. I meant across. Anyway, so I gave you an example of a mixed species flock in China in the last episode, and let me give you an example that we came across here in Bhutan. And that was at the Royal Botanical Garden, which is not really like a manicured garden. it's mostly just native plants in their natural state, mostly. So this isn't all of the species that we saw in this mixed species flock, but I'll just give you an example of some of these birds that were basically all in a small group of trees and shrubs. Blue-fronted red start, Rufus gorgetted flycatcher, slady-backed flycatcher, Himalayan blue tail, chestnut thrush, white-throated laughing thrush,

chestnut-tailed minla, hoary-throated barwing, Rufus Sibia, chestnut crowned laughing thrush, striated laughing thrush, Rufus winged fulveta, streakbreasted scimitar babbler, Rufus capped babbler, Rufus vented Euhina, wistkered Euhina, white-browed fulveta, ashy-throated warbler, green-backed tit, and so on. Yeah, so when that happens, it's just like, it's just like the best thing ever. Because it can be pretty quiet as you're walking through the forest, nothing, nothing, and then, ah, a mixed species flock arrives, and oh my God!

total chaos erupts. You don't know which way to look. Birds are everywhere. And yeah, you know, I was mentioning things like minlas and all this, Fulvettas. So that's a thing you have to get used to when you arrive to this part of the world and you're new here and you're birding. You know, it's not just finches and sparrows

and all the things you might be used to if you're, at least if you're North American or European. There are bird names that, for some reason, all end in A. There's Sibia, Minla, Tizia, Coutia, Mizia, Fulveda, Yuhina. munya, all very nice words, I think, for the most part, they derive from local names for these birds. And in many cases, those names have become the genus name for the species. So Coutia or C-U-T-I-A is what, you know, the Himalayan C-U-T-I-A is also the genus.

That C-U-T-I-A, that's the name of the genus. In all of these words, Sibia, Minla, Mizia, these I think would make great names for a daughter. You know, if I was ever going to have kids, which I'm not. But if I was, and I had a daughter, I think I would maybe name her Euhina Philipson or Teesia Philipson. I don't know. One of these. She'd probably really be mad at me for that when she grew up. So, you know, I was just mentioning that mixed species flock that we had at the Royal Botanical Garden in Bhutan.

And a funny thing that happened that day, right as we arrived, there was this river otter that was just there hanging out and I guess the the caretaker there was like yeah this is a river otter that was rescued as a pup and it basically grew up there and so it's like super friendly with people and it was a wild otter at one point it's a erasian river otter and this thing is super cute and it's super wiggly and energetic and you know I'm like yeah I'm going to get me some of that I'm going to pet me an otter so I go in I'm petting the otter it's very playful and super ridiculously cute, but of course, right away, then it starts like playing with my fingers, like biting my fingers, like a puppy might. But this thing has got really, really sharp teeth.

And even though it was playing, I had to be very careful to extract my fingers from its mouth. Otherwise, I would be bleeding all over the place. So yeah, so we just get there. And this otter basically decides to tag along with us. And we're birding throughout the park, at least for long ways. And this thing just kept following us, just cracking us up. And it kept biting at our shoelaces. So you had to watch your step because it was get right under your feet and then it's chewing on your shoelaces and you're trying to like make it stop. Anyway, it was really a funny special thing. It's like, yeah, I don't think that's ever going to happen again. I'm not going to go on a birding walk with a little river otter tagging along. Anyway, yeah, lots of fun experiences like

that, lots of great stories. And, you know, I just want to end here by saying, by saying that I feel incredibly fortunate, incredibly lucky to have had this experience. I had basically no mishaps, no problems across this two and a half month journey through five countries. Even though I travel for work, it's what I do. This felt exceptional, like a trip of a lifetime. And I just feel yeah, so lucky. It was amazing. Truly, truly amazing. You know, we'd be out birding. And I would just stop all the time and just try to stop and say, like, remind myself. where I am in the world, really soak up the feeling of that environment, that forest, or wherever we were, look at the landscape, appreciate it. You know, it was just a really

amazing thing. So I hope that these episodes have been interesting and maybe a little bit of inspiring. If you haven't been to this part of the world, maybe you'll get over here someday and you'll get to have some of these experiences yourself. I really do hope and wish that for you. This is an amazing, fascinating part of our beautiful planet. So there you have it. Episode 109, the last from the field episode for my Asian Odyssey. It is now 2025. So happy New Year if you're listening to this episode around the time of its publication. And happy day to you whenever you're listening to it, if it's far in the future.

And yes, as I get back home, I'm flying home tonight. I'll take a little while to get there. but I'm looking forward to getting back to my sort of regular programming. Even though this has been fun, it'll be nice to get back to the science of birds as usual. I hope you're looking forward to that as well. Even though I've heard lots of nice feedback about these from the field episodes. So thank you for that. Thank you to all of you who have let me know that you've enjoyed this format.

And a big thank you to all of my newest supporters, my patrons on Patreon. on. So welcome to Deborah Rowe, Sam and Liam Mullen, Julie S, Frank, C. Donaldson, Luke Metherill, and Karen Morse. Welcome and thank you so much for the support. You and all my other patrons are really making this podcast possible. I know I say that fairly frequently, but it's really true. You make this a viable project for me to keep doing. So thank you. If you're listening and you too would like to be. become a supporter, you just check out my Patreon page over at patreon.com slash science of birds. There's also a link in the show notes. Well, maybe not on this one. But there's, I think

there is. But there's also a link on the Science of Birds website, and so on and so forth. If you'd like to get in touch with me, you can send me an email. It's Ivan at Scienceofbirds.com. I am sometimes slow to respond, but I do try to respond to everyone if I can. And yeah, for listening and I will talk to you next time. Cheers.